PageUp Talent Blog

Employee Spotlight - Global Head of PreSales

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 02:00:00 +0000

Jen leads our global Pre-Sales team and is based in our Melbourne office. When she isn't wowing customers with PageUp's deep functionality, she's enjoying live music, finding a great new food spot, or planning her next travel adventure.

How long have you been at PUP?

Over 6 years!

Has your role changed since you first started at PUP? If so, how has it changed?

Yes, I initially started as a Freelance Trainer then employed directly as a Implementation Consultant, promoted to Program Manager and then Global Head of PreSales.

What advice do you have for future PUP Stars?

First and foremost be yourself and always bring your personality to work, it’s all about the Zing! There are no silly questions! Share your ideas and opinions openly to colleagues and your People Leaders. Drive your career, take risks and learn from them, and finally be passionate!

What are you most passionate about outside of work?

Music, Art, Food, Travel, and Plants!!

What gets you most excited about the company’s future?

PageUp is a great size (approx 200 employees) so it has a caring, family feel to it. Our global presence gives you access to amazing opportunities that you would not ordinarily get in other companies.

What is the culture like at PUP?

Our culture is very open and supportive and we do a great job tying our values (Belief, Zing, Integrity, WeValYou and Clients) into everything we do. You may observe values on a company’s website or read/see them somewhere in the office, but at Pageup we all make a conscious effort in living and breathing our company values. In my experience observing values actually playing out in everyday working life is very rare to find!

What is your favorite PUP Value and why?

#Zing is my favourite value because it allows you to bring your true personality to work!

What has been your favorite moment at PUP?

I love winning whatever that might be! Small daily wins, team wins, or opportunity wins!

What is your favorite benefit at PUP and why?

Awesome Day - I get to go and enjoy a day off on the company!

Product Development at PageUp

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 02:00:00 +0000

Author: Tal Rotbart, CIO

Why would you want to join PageUp's development team?

Let’s start with our product development culture:

Build the right thing - we utilise exploratory research and the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to really understand what jobs our users are 'hiring' our products to do. Further, we leverage lean-startup style test-and-learn loops to gather validated learning and incrementally release value to our users. Everyone in the team is engaged in this process -- it is not something relegated to a separate product strategy team.
Aligned Team Autonomy - we allow teams to pick the tools they use to solve the problems at hand. Sometimes that means using new technologies, other times that means using existing ones that we've built sensible defaults for.
Empowered decision making - Our rule of thumb for whether we have the right structure and process is: Does a decision take at most two other people to make? Can it be made at this level or does it have escalate higher? If the answer to any of the above is no, we need to change something -- we've recently change our organisational structure to support this -- into strategically aligned cross-functional value streams -- and yes, that means having representation from marketing, sales & customer success integrated into our product teams.

Engagement - our engagement results are higher than CultureAmp “New Tech” benchmark report, and our Glassdoor score is 4.0. Anecdotally, a developer left me the following note when he finished a two week internship: “I'm sure you're already aware, but [there] really is something special between those walls and it was a privilege to experience it!”
Agility - it is deeply embedded in our culture, and has been for a while. The entire organisation (even Marketing) is run in an agile way.
Choose Your Own Mentor - as people developments is a core cultural value for us, each members of the team gets to choose a mentor (or two), who can help then develop their craftsmanship.
We Celebrate Failure - we believe that failure is an extremely valuable part of a learning culture. Fear of failure is a paralysing force that we’d like to avoid in our team, and instead, empower our team to experiment and learn.
Accountability - This word is often bandied about in top-down command and control organisations, which breeds understandable resistance. To us, accountability is a commitment a person, or a group of people, is making to another. One of our values is Integrity, and that includes keeping your promises -- or if you can't -- taking ownership of it. Example: I am personally accountable to the entire product team, to create an engaging work environment for them and I measure whether or not I am successful at doing so through our engagement survey and through my 1:1s with them.

Example: I am personally accountable to the entire product team, to create an engaging work environment for them and I measure whether or not I am successful at doing so through our engagement survey and through my 1:1s with them

Quality is Ours to Own - our teams own their quality and their ops. In the first two years since we parted ways with our dedicated QAs, our overall support load (as scaled by number of customers) has dropped by over 15% year over year.
We are Flex - we respect work is one part of your life so we accommodate flexibility and the opportunity to work from home. We even get paid time to do volunteer work!
Zing - we want to push the boundaries and dedicate two days each quarter to come together as a business (we have global team input) and run TuneUp, our interpretation of a hackathon. We’ve also been experimenting with a double-TuneUp -- four days instead of two!

Our development teams in Melbourne and Manila work on our Talent Acquisition and Retention platforms. A bit about the tech stack they work on:

We're fully hosted on AWS. Even the legacy part of our software is deployed daily to five AWS regions, where as our more modern code is in continuously delivered microservices & single page apps. Some of our microservices are completely serverless (AWS lambda) and some are written in .NET Core running on Linux within Docker container clusters. The single page apps are written in React (with either JavaScript or TypeScript). We have some older SPAs which are written in Angular 1 or 2 (on TypeScript).

However, it is not all a bed of roses, as any successful software company with a long enough history will attest, we have a significant amount of product complexity and technical debt that we are wrangling with on any given day.

With two decades years of history, while our more modern code is as above, we also have everything else in the entire range of .NET’s rich history, including a significant amount of ASP Classic pages.

We are aiming to tackle our product complexity by strategically and incrementally breaking up our .NET app into continuously delivered microservices and single-page apps, utilising event-driven architecture and domain-driven design as well as diversifying our technology stack and experimenting with new technologies.

This is to enable our product teams to innovate autonomously, and to aim to answer the question: how do you provide a unified experience to our users, while delivering software independently?

Our development team in Ireland and the UK work on our Recruitment Marketing platform. The tech stack they work on looks like this:

This industry is evolving at a rapid pace and if you join the team you’ll get a chance to really shape the future of the platform. We are designing, testing and shipping code on a daily basis, we like to move fast. We have a focus on designing and writing clean code and are exploring Event-Driven Architecture. Our platform is hosted in AWS and built on Ruby on Rails, using MySQL database for storage running on Ubuntu Linux. We use MiniTest and Webdriver to test our code, and use AWS CodePipeline and GitHub to deploy our software to production several times a day.

If you’re interested in heavy lifting and are the kind of developer that leads by doing and love collaborating with smart people to solve real customer problems -- we are the place for you.

Employee Spotlight - Business Development Manager

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 02:00:00 +0000

Markus is a Business Development Manager in our Melbourne office. When he isn't engaging with prospects and exciting them about PageUp, he can be found enjoying seaside activities with his family.

How long have you been at PUP?
Over 2 years.

What do you do at PUP?
I am Business Development Manager for the Southern Region covering Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia. I liaise with commercial and public sector organisations who have requirements for new and better Recruitment, Onboarding, Performance, Learning and Succession Management systems. I talk to these organisations about PageUp’s Enterprise and Mid-Market Talent Management solutions, understand their needs, propose and demonstrate how we can meet their needs and onboard them as new PageUp clients.

Has your role changed since you first started at PUP? If so, how has it changed?
My role hasn’t changed, but our product offering has expanded with the introduction of Recruitment Marketing as a new module within our Recruitment suite. The industry is constantly evolving, we are innovating, and our prospects and clients are transforming their businesses and technology, so it’s exciting to keep on top of all this and be considered a trusted adviser for many of these organisations.

What advice do you have for future PUP Stars?
Be an active part of the team, and reach out and collaborate with your colleagues in all functions of PageUp. PageUp’s strength is its quality and diversity of talent and the fun and productive collaborations we have cross-functionally as well as just within your immediate teams.

What are you most passionate about outside of work?
My family, travel, connecting with people, reading, playing guitar, seaside activities, self-education and being curious about life.

What gets you most excited about the company’s future?
When organisations see the vision of our Unified Talent Management experience, and Next Generation recruitment with PageUp’s user friendly and powerful functionality, and then realise the people and support behind our products, they become converts and then life-long Raving Fans. There is still so much potential in the market to onboard new PageUp clients. I’m excited to see how our roadmap gets implemented, and other exciting new acquisitions and marketplace partnerships.

What is the culture like at PUP?
Open, collaborative, fun, hard-working, full of banter - but everyone has each other’s back. From a Sales and Support perspective, PageUp makes it easy for prospects and clients to do business with us.

What is your favorite PUP Value and why?
Zing - it captures the sparkle, drive and enthusiasm of a typical PageUp employee. I think we must hire for Zing!

What has been your favorite moment at PUP?
When we reached SuperGreen last FY, and celebrated in Torquay together. The SuperGreen event was recognising PageUp’s global sales over-achievement, and was such a fantastic way for the entire organisation to bond and celebrate together in recognition of the fact that every department, every individual within PageUp contributes to the retention and growth of our clients.

What is your favorite benefit at PUP and why?
The benefit of working with very talented, diverse, committed and fun colleagues.

Learning and Career Development

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 02:00:00 +0000

Learning

At PageUp, we’re passionate about connecting people to great careers. That’s why we built our Unified Talent Management platform to help our clients attract, retain and develop their people. We display that same passion with our people! We want every PUPstar to experience learning and development every day at PageUp, and to take an active role in shaping their own learning experiences. We foster our employees’ continuous learning by providing our team with learning experiences in their jobs, from those around them and formally. Being an industry leader gives you access to some of the best minds in the business, which is why we’ve created a ‘pick your own mentor’ initiative. There’s plenty of opportunities to learn from others through hour of power, learning lunches and cross-functional team initiatives. We have also provided formal job specific training as well as Innovation training and ‘KickAss Conversations’ workshop to further foster our feedback culture.

Career Development

At PageUp we want to achieve greatness together. Through learning and development we will empower you to make decisions and take ownership of initiatives. Our environment is innovative, collaborative and learning-focused, so each day you will walk away having learned something new. Joining PageUp you could build the career path of your dreams! To give you some inspiration here is a snapshot of some real career paths at PageUp.

Real Career Paths @ PageUp

Employee Spotlight - SVP of North America and EMEA

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 02:00:00 +0000

Sarah is our SVP of North America and EMEA. Based in our New York office she leads our efforts and teams in both regions. Outside of work she has a passion for fitness and can be found on a ride, run or HIIT session!

How long have you been at PUP?
It was 2006 and I joined as a fresh-faced graduate straight out of Melbourne’s Swinburne University. I used to row competitively and one of my good friends at the rowing club suggested that I apply for a role at a small SaaS company that was doing well. I never imagined then the journey that PageUp would take me on over the next fourteen years.

What do you do at PUP?
On some days, I am a counselor, a social organizer, a removalist, a courier... But on most days I am the Senior Vice President for North America and EMEA.

Talk us through your journey at PUP?
In fourteen years, I have had eight roles in four different offices around the PageUp world. My first role was a Support Consultant helping people to reset their passwords - I laugh now, but this personal level customer support is a critical part of our business success. After a couple of years I moved into implementing our software, where I progressed through a number of roles in Melbourne and Sydney, developing a close understanding of customer needs and working with them to make sure the system addressed those needs and created business value. In 2014, PageUp expanded to Asia and I joined the team setting up our head office in Singapore. Technically, my title was Asia Alliance Manager but in reality I was selling, demoing, implementing, and supporting our software for our Asia customer base while building a great team. Within a few years I had worked my way up to Vice President of Asia and my breadth of experience allowed me to progress to the SVP of North America and EMEA in early 2019. Today, I still know how to change a password, but now I manage a high-performing team of nearly 30 professionals who strive every day to be the number one Talent Management provider in our region.

What advice do you have for future PUP Stars?
Fourteen years ago, I would never have imagined that I would travel the world and meet so many of my closest friends - and my now husband - but none of this would have been possible without a willingness to adapt, learn new skills, and take risks. So my advice to future PUP Stars is to be flexible, ride the wave, take advantage of the opportunities that PageUp can provide and know how to have fun!

What are you most passionate about outside of work?
In my rowing days, I used to rise at 5am every morning, train until 7:30am, work until 4pm then train again until 7pm - so fitness has always been a part of my life outside PageUp. Today, I might not be on the water, but I have a new found love for an American fitness startup named ‘Peloton’. We have a bike at home and every day I ride, run, complete a HIIT session or relax after a long day with a yoga class.

What gets you most excited about the company’s future?
I might be biased, but PageUp hires the best people! Great talent is a fundamental strength of our business. From awesome customer service to a team that develops a highly configurable product, I believe PageUp has the ingredients to continue our exciting growth.

What is the culture like at PUP?
From the very beginning we were a company that had to compete and win against some much larger household names, so we have developed an ‘underdog’ culture that means that all members of the PageUp team will band together for a common goal, whether it is winning a huge contract or improving sourcing effectiveness for an existing customer.

In Australia, this culture has made us the leading Recruitment Management provider and this culture is fundamental to our further success in other markets around the world.

What is your favorite PUP Value and why?
All our values mean something personal to me, but one in particular stands out: integrity. I am a strong believer in standing by my word - and I know my team shares this same value. Our integrity is a hallmark of our sales, implementation, and our customer success for every customer around the world.

What has been your favorite moment at PUP?
Fourteen years has brought so many favorite moments! In Melbourne I lived with two other colleagues and they are still my close friends today. In Singapore we traveled as a team, shared our successes (and our pains), and these are life experiences I carry with me today. In New York, our team gathered together online at the height of the pandemic to share personal stories and cocktail recipes. These close connections are the life blood of my PageUp journey.

What is your favorite benefit at PUP and why?
Community Service means a lot to me, so the PageUp offering of ‘volunteer leave’ is my favorite benefit. I have used this time to deliver meals on wheels for seniors in Singapore and collect 60lbs or garbage from the Hudson River in New York, among many other activities. I know community support means a lot to our PageUp team, so I look forward to finding more opportunities in the years ahead.

In Crowd — AWS on-demand elevated access

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 02:00:00 +0000

Author: Karthik Padmanabhan

Karthik has been with PageUp for over 5 years, having originally joining in a Technical Advisor role, he is now our Head of Architecture and has been a key contributor to our AWS architecture and strategy.

Some time ago at PageUp, we adopted AWS multi-account strategy. Today we have about 80 AWS accounts in PageUp.

The multi-account strategy enabled autonomy and ownership at PageUp, while like anything, it has trade-offs.

Even with a handful of accounts, managing elevated access was a big challenge for us. We did not have the luxury to have a person be responsible for this nor did we want centralised responsibility for it.

So, when it came to a multi-account strategy, we knew it would pay to be proactive and automated.

As you must have figured it out by now, this article discusses how at PageUp, we automated on-demand elevated access to AWS for our development teams.

Principles

We tried to stick to the “Principles of least privilege.”

Everyone has ReadOnly access to AWS Accounts they belong to by default.
Only provide elevated access to AWS accounts that are requested/needed.
Elevation of access is only for an exceptional situation, on-demand, peer-reviewed, auditable, time-bound and automated.

The last principle especially highlights the importance given in PageUp to encourage Continuous Deployment and Infrastructure as Code practices.

Intended experience

Elevated AWS access experience @PageUp

Most of the times developer require elevated access to AWS only when they are dealing with a production situation, so we wanted to ensure the experience is as straight forward and pain-free as possible.

In Crowd — The solution

AWS State Machine

Given the process requires some form of the state machine, our readily available choice was AWS Step function.

We had some experience already with AWS Landing Zone that we deployed not long ago — so the team was quite comfortable with it.

Organising AWS Accounts

Like I mentioned above, we have more than 80+ accounts; we use a combination of AWS Organisation Units & PageUp AWS Domains to organise them.

Each of PageUp AWS Domain has seven accounts. The creation, as well as management of these AWS accounts, are based on Continuous deployment system called Domain Vending Machine (It uses AWS’s Account Vending Concept — a subject of another day).

Example: HR Organisation is a big thing in PageUp, so is Screening (in the context of recruitment). They have their own PageUp AWS Domains.

IAM User & Group management

All our users, groups and their associated permissions reside in a Git repo. It allows for easy audit and change management. As you see below each user is associated with groups each representing a PageUp AWS Domain.

Example

users:
karthikp:
groups:
- SoftwareDevelopers
- RecruitmentDomain
- CareersDomainterence:

groups:
- SoftwareDevelopers
- RecruitmentDomain
- CareersDomain
...

Groups such as “SoftwareDevelopers” provide access to standard IAM actions that are basic for all developers.

For every PageUp AWS Domain, we have two policies as highlighted below.

groups:
Screening:
policy_file: Screening/Screening.j2
ScreeningMaintenance:
policy_file: Screening/ScreeningMaintenance.j2
...

The maintenance policy is used for elevation and will have PowerExecutionRole or similar associated with the group.

{# Default Policy sample #}
{
"Statement": [ {
"Sid": "AllowAssumeScreeningUserExecutionRole",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [ "sts:AssumeRole" ],
"Condition": {
"Bool": {
"aws:MultiFactorAuthPresent": "true"
}
},
"Resource": [
{# screening_deploy #}
"arn:aws:iam::xxx:role/ReadOnlyExecutionRole",
{# screening_staging #},
"arn:aws:iam::xxxx:role/ReadOnlyExecutionRole",
....{# Maintenance policy sample #}
{
"Statement": [ {
"Sid": "AllowAssumeScreeningUserExecutionRole",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [ "sts:AssumeRole" ],
"Condition": {
"Bool": {
"aws:MultiFactorAuthPresent": "true"
}
},
"Resource": [
{# screening_deploy #}
"arn:aws:iam::xxx:role/PowerUserExecutionRole",
{# screening_staging #},
"arn:aws:iam::xxxx:role/PowerUserExecutionRole",
....

Circling back to the workings

The system knows that every PageUp AWS domain has two policies, a default one and a maintenance policy. Once a request is approved, it attaches the user with the corresponding maintenance policy for a configured amount of time.

a simple explanation on the system

It’s been good 18 months since we put in place and since then never bothered to touch it because

It’s one of those simple solutions that just works

Credits

The credits for designing and building this simple solution goes to my team of excellent developers current and past.

Terence Tham — Designed overall solution.
Colin Scott — Among several things, he named it as “In Crowd.”
Jack G — Contributed to “PageUp-AWS”

PageUp one of Australia’s Best Places to Work 2021

Wed, 19 May 2021 02:00:00 +0000

In April 2021 PageUp was honoured to be recognised as one of Australia and New Zealand’s Best Places to Work. The prestigious annual list, published by The Australian Financial Review and Boss Magazine, is based on a rigorous assessment process managed by Australia’s leading behavioural science consultancy, Inventium.

PageUp Talent Blog

Employee Spotlight - Global Head of PreSales

Product Development at PageUp

Employee Spotlight - Business Development Manager

Learning and Career Development

Employee Spotlight - SVP of North America and EMEA

In Crowd — AWS on-demand elevated access

Principles

Intended experience

In Crowd — The solution

Organising AWS Accounts

IAM User & Group management

Circling back to the workings

PageUp one of Australia’s Best Places to Work 2021

Read more here>